I spent a good portion of this weekend upgarding the boot drive on our home PC. The Dell PC that we’ve had for a few years came with a 40 gig Maxtor hard drive. Not only was the drive becoming smaller and smaller as we filled it with more and more stuff, but the inevitable Windows XP bloat was getting serious and slowing important things down. At some point over the last couple of years, we also lost the nice XP login screen and fast user switching which was a nice feature that we really missed.
A few weeks back, got a good deal on a 160 gig drive at Best Buy and I started to plan my upgrade. All of our personal and work documents, audio and video are stored on a second drive, but I wasn’t enthusiastic about the idea of having to reinstall all of my applications. The first thing I needed to do was slipstream XP Service Pack 2 into my existing XP installation disk. I used [url=http://www.nliteos.com]nLite[/url] to do this as well as add in the required drivers for my hardware. This is a great app. I burned a new bootable XP disk and the first part of my upgrade planning was complete.
The next step was to back up the application data that resides (for the most part) in the Documents and Settings directories. Microsoft makes some useful applications for this including the [url=http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/expert/crawford_november12.mspx]Files and Settings Transfer Wizard[/url] and the [url=http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;826809]Office 2003 Save My Settings Wizard[/url]. I had never used these before, but they were quite efficient and performed as advertised. One note – if you have a multiuser system, you’ll need to back up the Office settings for each user!
I realized at this point, that rather than backing up the rest of the files for our important applications (Opera and IE, EditPlus, Adobe apps, newsreader software, iTunes, etc), I would just reconnect the old drive once I had most everything on the new and copy whatever I needed. Simple!
Surprisingly, this tactic worked pretty well. Some companies are getting good about letting the user specify the location of their configuration files. Opera is a great example of this and I’m sure they will continue this trend with version 9. It was nice to have all my Adobe options stored away as well, although I did copy over most of the settings from the Application Data directory just to be safe.
Once all this was done and the apps reinstalled, we were ready to go. Just a couple more things to install and then I am going to create an image that I can use going forward. I’m looking at [url=http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage]Acronis True Image 9.0[/url] as a way to do this. I’ve had some negative experiences with Norton Ghost, so I think this is a better option. Acronis’s software has some nice features. In addition to just making drive images, you can schedule backups of various directories and file types to different media. This is something that I’ve been doing through BAT files and WinZip, but I think I need a more integrated solution.